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Antonioni's Nothingness and Beauty

BROODING metaphysical mood music: that's one way to describe the poetic tone of the films of the Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni. The climate of romantic neurasthenia that seeps into his work is captured in "Antonioni," a song by the great Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso: "Visione del Silenzio/Angelo voto" ("Vision of silence/Empty street corner"). The song goes on to evoke a page with no sentence, a letter written on a face and love as a "useless window." Like the stories in Mr. Antonioni's films, the melody never quite lands. Plaintively crooned over a sighing bed of strings, it hovers in the air like an anxious, yearning spirit.

This song distills the essence of Antonioni, whose career will be explored in a three-week retrospective at BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn starting Wednesday that includes 15 features (in new prints) and several obscure shorts.

Until his breakthrough film, "L'Avventura," this refined strain of Existential melancholy had never been represented on the screen with anything approaching the intensity that Mr. Antonioni and his screen alter ego, the actress Monica Vitti, expressed in their films together. When "L'Avventura" was released in 1960, a young generation of cineastes immediately recognized it as an intellectual and emotional expression of a mood that had already found its way into literature, painting, music and architecture. I was a college student when I saw "L'Avventura" for the first of many times, and it changed my life.

Here at last was the film correlative of an underlying anxiety in the air at a hopeful moment, the dawn of the 60's, when Modernism was at its apex. The future loomed as an increasingly secularized arena charged with erotic possibility, in which church, marriage and community were being supplanted by a new culture of technology, mobility and pleasure. But was there a spiritual cost?

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David Hemmings and Veruschka in "Blow-Up" (1966).Credit
Photofest

In "L'Avventura" Ms. Vitti's character, Claudia, and her companion and lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) embody the quintessential affluent modern couple, distracted, dissatisfied, but clinging to each other as they drifted uneasily through this brave new world without anchors.

Sandro has hastily latched on to Claudia after the mysterious disappearance of Anna, his lover and her closest friend, during an afternoon boating party off the shore of Sicily. Even before the members of the party abandon their search on the tiny rocky island from which she vanishes, Sandro makes a move on Claudia. Back on the mainland she quickly surrenders to her desire.

"L'Avventura" was the first (and to my mind remains the definitive) film about the diminishing attention span of a modern world. Decades before the term attention deficit disorder was popularized, it codified an emerging cultural malaise. As she embraces her sudden relationship, even Claudia, the film's conscience, has to remind herself of her best friend's disappearance and to stifle her dread that Anna will suddenly turn up. (Sandro already seems to have forgotten her.)

She never reappears. Her unsolved, unexplained disappearance is the movie's conceptual coup. Later in the couple's travels, when Claudia discovers Sandro has betrayed her with a prostitute, she comforts him as he weeps in shame and frustration. For those of us weaned on Hollywood endings, this final scene in "L'Avventura" bared the uneasy reality of civilized love in an Existential world.

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Monica Vitti in "L'Avventura" (1960).Credit
Photofest

My identification with "L'Avventura" came with the guilty pleasure of luxuriating in the upscale despair and erotic stimulation provided by the film and its two successors, "La Notte" (1961) and "L'Eclisse" ("Eclipse," 1962). Together these black-and-white films constitute Mr. Antonioni's trilogy on modernity and its discontents. "Red Desert" (1964) his next film, in which he moved into color, and his last to star Ms. Vitti, might be considered a coda.

I attended the opening-day performances of all Antonioni movies through "Zabriskie Point" (1970) and usually remained in the theater to gorge myself on a second helping of what I'd just seen. "Blow-Up" (1966) with its photographer protagonist was Mr. Antonioni's commercial zenith, set in swinging London. I loved it at the time, but today its notorious purple-paper orgy in which the photographer romps with teenage groupies and its pot party sequence seem quaint and faintly ludicrous.

A few keen-eyed dissenters recognized the self-pitying and fashion-mongering aspects of Antonioni's appeal. As visually magnificent and symbolically resonant as they are, his films inevitably glamorize the ennui they portrayed. Oh, to be rich, beautiful and bored. Oh, to suffer as exquisitely as Sandro and Claudia and their friends in "L'Avventura."

In "La Notte," who could resist identifying with Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, the king and queen of European cinema, playing a writer and his wife whose marriage has turned to ashes? Or with the young Alain Delon, who plays a hotshot stockbroker opposite Ms. Vitti in "L'Eclisse"?

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Jeanne Moreau in "La Notte" (1961).Credit
Photofest

Although I wanted to love all of Antonioni's films unconditionally, none contained a symbolic act as powerful as Anna's disappearance or a location as provocative as the island from which she vanishes. "La Notte" is crowded with forced symbols of synthetic, twisted eroticism: a contortionist act in a nightclub, a voracious foaming-at-the-mouth hospital patient who offers herself to Mastroianni and finally a sand pit in which the unhappy couple futilely attempt to reconnect.

Who are these aimless, drifting malcontents? Don't they have hobbies? They don't seem to read, watch television, cook or play sports. Why do they spend most of their time moping until the next frustrating bout of sex or nonsex? For even the stylized love scenes in Antonioni films are usually fraught with anxiety and ambivalence; there is finally no peace.

Decadent, a cultural watchword of the day, was slapped onto the films of Antonioni, Visconti and Fellini (whose movie "La Dolce Vita" beat out "L'Avventura" to win the 1960 top award at Cannes). Early on, the critic Pauline Kael, who had championed "L'Avventura," smelled a rat. In her famous essay "Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" she lumped together "La Notte," "La Dolce Vita" and Alain Resnais's "Last Year at Marienbad" as the anemic antithesis of good old red-blooded Hollywood trash. As much as Kael liked "L'Avventura," her later description misrepresented it as "upper class neo-realism."

Since 1961 the cultural portents signaled in Antonioni films have been borne out. Today "decadence," once a titillating label for 60's European films depicting not-so-wild parties, describes a vast, steroid culture of greed, gluttony and pornography.

More important, Antonioni has given us a body of astonishing cinematic poetry, of visual compositions in which every element is charged with emotional and symbolic resonance. In his later films the stories may have fallen away, but sheer beauty remains, along with the sadness. For as another great poet, Wallace Stevens, wrote, "Death is the mother of beauty."